THE RATS OF PREVLONSK

By Helen Borel    

Mrs. Yelena Katz hated rats.  Rats reminded her of her childhood in Prevlonsk where
those ugly, sooty vermin scampered and scurried freely at night among the erosions of
the stone bricks of the kitchen wall, snatching the few morsels of bread Mama had saved
for tomorrow's breakfast.

Yelena Horoshovna's girlhood was pitiful.  She, her brothers and sisters, mother and
father, grandmother and grandfather were starving most of the time in their crowded hovel.
Adding horror to their misery, Yelena, coming to tuck him in, witnessed her baby brother
Ivan bitten to death in the night by three of these rodents; a large, fat, black one
administering the bite of death, chomping its fangs into the baby's jugular.

The rats and the Horoshovna family survived in inseparable disharmony after they buried
Ivan.  The little to eat became less and the rats ate that, growing fatter.  Yelena grabbed
one, gnawing on her last bit of apple one night, by the neck watching it squirm as she
choked it.  She flung it against the wall and squashed it with the worn wooden heel of her
left boot.

Her aching stomach was Yelena's constant companion.  She knew its gurgles, its belches
of huge chunks of air that, swallowed, had come to take the place of food.  She knew its
grumbles, its every complaint.  Her stomach knew her too, often distracting her from its
gnawing pain to have her listen to its dysphonic music.

One night, the grumbling that had started in her stomach as she lay awake switched from
inside her body to outside from the street.  A gang of townspeople in black, carrying two
crude torches and axes dripping with blood were heading toward their house.  Yelena
heard the shush, shush, shush of their peasant boots on the footpath.  She heard their
grumbling and grim laughter as they moved closer and closer, the two lone torches in
front gleaming like the hungry eyes of their kitchen rats, the black pulsing body of the
beast gliding across the floor of the outside path, positioning itself to pounce on her
helpless family.

"Pogrom!  Pogrom!" screamed Natalya Verovna, Yelena's grandmother.  Everyone
scampered like their own rats into the cellar whose wooden door Yevgeny, her father,
had seamed in such a way as to make it appear no cellar ever existed in this house.

Down in that dark, damp grave - which Anya, her mother, had stocked with stinking
cheese, dried fruits crawling with insects, moldy bread, potatoes turning into vodka,
and a few torn pillows and rags from old clothes for warmth - they were in closer
company with the rats and the very vicious fat, black one who had killed their Ivan.
But, for the time being, they were safe from the greater threat outside.

Only Yosepina, Yelena's big sister, was outside walking toward the house from
Aleksandr's fruit stall when the mindless, peasant mob approached.  Aleksandr was
the boy Yosepina was to marry.  Only Yosepina was attacked and butchered.

Mindful that "the rat squad," as Grandpa Fyodor called the bloody murderers in the
night, roamed for Jewish victims in its drunken stupor for days on end before its
frenzied orgy ended, Yelena's wretched little family lay trapped below their own house,
huddling together, eyes wide, barely moving to take a breath, unable to avoid being
crawled upon and being bitten, savaged by the lesser of the two evils.

Hours and days passed.  The miserable dead food Mama had stored up for them was
gone, most of it stolen by the cellar rats.

When the rumbling in their stomachs replaced the growling and destroying they last
heard yesterday from the street, Yevgeny Horoshovna, holding the small square of
cellar door ajar, peered up to witness the horrible:  Yosepina hacked to bits, her
blood making a thick sauce around her.  Her father screamed in places no human
ear could hear and, saying nothing to the others, tip-toed up the rotting, creaking
stairs and made his preparations.

Everyone had a piece of meat to eat that night for the first time in five years.  They
savored each bite only after their initial hunger was sated by rapid swallows of large
chunks of it.  Every evening, her father, Yevgeny, brought down more.  After each
feast, he buried the bones in their arid old potato patch and said Kaddish:
                             
                              Yisgadal V'Yisgadash
                             Schmai Rabai...

Soon, they all perished in Dachau.  Except Yelena.  The rats again had come in
the night. The vermin ruled Europe.

Copyright 1977-2015 Helen Borel. All rights reserved.

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here:  helenborel@earthlink.net and in the Subject line, write: THE RATS OF PREVLONSK

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describing the “Mission Statement” for AAH PUBLISHED AT LAST...and that ALL 
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